It's been nearly a month since I returned from from NYC and the Teaching Institute at Spence (TiAS); school has started, kids are in my seats again, and I'm trying to get myself into the rhythm of a new school year. I went back and read my previous post on the vulnerability of taping classes and posting them for the world to see pre-Spence experience; you can see my thinking here. My sense and thinking post-Spence is exactly what it should be after a profound professional development experience--dramatically evolved from what it was a month ago.
Feeling empowered--the curating of the videos
The fantastic facilitators of the TIaS watched the submitted videos of the participants before we arrived, and they curated the videos for us. Yes, we were going to look at our teaching, but we were going to dial in on a five-minute segment of our class, not the entire eighty five minutes. When it came time to look at our videos, the facilitators suggested that we zero in on one of the three segments they selected, but they also allowed us time and space to choose our own segment if those curated segments didn't speak to us. That felt incredibly empowering.
Feeling empowered again--creating a question of practice and a protocol to unpack the question
The TIaS facilitators also empowered us to design our own question of practice. I am really interested in how I talk with students about their engagement in the class and how we measure engagement, so I asked a question of my practice: how can I more effectively measure student engagement and communicate with them about that engagement so that they can grow?
From that question of practice, I developed a rubric I thought I might be able to use in my classes this fall. Then I developed a protocol to tune the rubric. Then I asked my fellow Institute goers to participate in the protocol to tune the rubric while we watched a segment of my class.
Takeaways to Take Forward
The biggest surprise for me (and something I wasn't even thinking of before I went); I don't have to watch the entire class to learn something about my teaching. A lot can be gained from focusing on just five minutes of a class.
There is incredible power in allowing an observation or taping of class to come from a personal question of practice. While I have had several administrators ask me, "What would you like me to look for?", that somehow isn't the same as getting to develop the question myself about a targeted segment of a class that is on tape, one that can be rewound and reviewed and reconsidered.
That everyone has some skin in the game matters, too. At TIaS, we had a small community of teachers who spent their week building trust and developing a common sense of both vulnerability and support. When I was partnered with other teachers, and I opened my classroom to them, and they opened their classrooms to me, we were able to have a great balance of inquiry and reflection, a sincere desire to lift up one another’s practice while also tuning it, and incredible care taken in giving each other feedback. I wonder if observations would feel differently (better?) if the observer would become the observed in a reciprocal, collaborative arrangement.
Protocols help democratize conversations, but they can also feel constraining to participants. Finding the right balance between the use of a protocol and a time for "open coaching" helps to honor both modes of discussion.
Finally, I said multiple times during the week that I feel more and more like teaching is brutifully messy work, and when we try to clean it up (through observations, protocols, curriculum development), we make it even messier. I'm reminded of all the times I try to clean up a quarter-sized drop of paint, and that quarter-sized drop suddenly becomes a foot-long smear on the hardwood. Perhaps I've taken the metaphor a bit far. Anyway, the messiness and the struggle to clean it up is where growth happens. My favorite norm for our week together at Spence--embrace each other's messiness. ·
Feeling empowered--the curating of the videos
The fantastic facilitators of the TIaS watched the submitted videos of the participants before we arrived, and they curated the videos for us. Yes, we were going to look at our teaching, but we were going to dial in on a five-minute segment of our class, not the entire eighty five minutes. When it came time to look at our videos, the facilitators suggested that we zero in on one of the three segments they selected, but they also allowed us time and space to choose our own segment if those curated segments didn't speak to us. That felt incredibly empowering.
Feeling empowered again--creating a question of practice and a protocol to unpack the question
The TIaS facilitators also empowered us to design our own question of practice. I am really interested in how I talk with students about their engagement in the class and how we measure engagement, so I asked a question of my practice: how can I more effectively measure student engagement and communicate with them about that engagement so that they can grow?
From that question of practice, I developed a rubric I thought I might be able to use in my classes this fall. Then I developed a protocol to tune the rubric. Then I asked my fellow Institute goers to participate in the protocol to tune the rubric while we watched a segment of my class.
Takeaways to Take Forward
The biggest surprise for me (and something I wasn't even thinking of before I went); I don't have to watch the entire class to learn something about my teaching. A lot can be gained from focusing on just five minutes of a class.
There is incredible power in allowing an observation or taping of class to come from a personal question of practice. While I have had several administrators ask me, "What would you like me to look for?", that somehow isn't the same as getting to develop the question myself about a targeted segment of a class that is on tape, one that can be rewound and reviewed and reconsidered.
That everyone has some skin in the game matters, too. At TIaS, we had a small community of teachers who spent their week building trust and developing a common sense of both vulnerability and support. When I was partnered with other teachers, and I opened my classroom to them, and they opened their classrooms to me, we were able to have a great balance of inquiry and reflection, a sincere desire to lift up one another’s practice while also tuning it, and incredible care taken in giving each other feedback. I wonder if observations would feel differently (better?) if the observer would become the observed in a reciprocal, collaborative arrangement.
Protocols help democratize conversations, but they can also feel constraining to participants. Finding the right balance between the use of a protocol and a time for "open coaching" helps to honor both modes of discussion.
Finally, I said multiple times during the week that I feel more and more like teaching is brutifully messy work, and when we try to clean it up (through observations, protocols, curriculum development), we make it even messier. I'm reminded of all the times I try to clean up a quarter-sized drop of paint, and that quarter-sized drop suddenly becomes a foot-long smear on the hardwood. Perhaps I've taken the metaphor a bit far. Anyway, the messiness and the struggle to clean it up is where growth happens. My favorite norm for our week together at Spence--embrace each other's messiness. ·
No comments:
Post a Comment